Lifetime Achievement - past talks

The ACL Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes outstanding contributions to computational linguistics. Recipients give a talk at the annual meeting of the ACL, and the text of the talk is generally published in Computational Linguistics. This page lists the published talks since the first award in 2004.

2026 recipient: Fernando Pereira. His award article will appear in a forthcoming issue of Computational Linguistics.
Year Recipient Article
2026 Fernando Pereira Forthcoming in Computational Linguistics
2025 Kathleen McKeown Retrospective and Future Views · CL 52(2), 2026
2024 Ralph Grishman MUCking In, or Fifty Years in Information Extraction · CL 51(1), 2025
2023 Martha Palmer My Big, Fat 50-Year Journey · CL 50(1), 2024
2022 Martha Evens Martha Palmer and Barbara Di Eugenio Interview Martha Evens · CL 48(4), 2022
2021 Jun'ichi Tsujii Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics · CL 47(4), 2021
2020 Bonnie Webber Kathy McKeown Interviews Bonnie Webber · CL 47(1), 2021
2019 Ronald M. Kaplan Computational Psycholinguistics · CL 45(4), 2019
2018 Mark Steedman The Lost Combinator · CL 44(4), 2018
2017 Barbara Grosz Smart Enough to Talk With Us? Foundations and Challenges for Dialogue Capable AI Systems · CL 44(1), 2018
2016 Joan Bresnan Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush · CL 42(4), 2016
2015 Sheng Li Translating Today into Tomorrow · CL 41(4), 2015
2014 Robert L. Mercer A Computational Life (video only)
2013 Jerry R. Hobbs Influences and Inferences
2012 Charles J. Fillmore Encounters with Language
2011 Eugene Charniak The Brain as a Statistical Inference Engine—and You Can Too
2010 William A. Woods The Right Tools: Reflections on Computation and Language
2009 Fred Jelinek The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT
2008 Yorick Wilks On Whose Shoulders?
2007 Lauri Karttunen Word Play
2006 Eva Hajičová Old Linguists Never Die, They Only Get Obligatorily Deleted
2005 Martin Kay A Life of Language
2004 Karen Spärck Jones Some Points in a Time

The 2020 and 2022 entries are interviews with the recipients. The 2014 talk was recorded as a video and not published in the journal.